In the early days of my first Italian Private Detective Agency Octopus, I have started to hear about satellite trackers and some colleague was feared of our extinction due to the new technologies. In reality it did not take place, because one thing is to know where is your observed object, but another thing is to see what he or she is doing. The GPS tracking, though, turns out to be an excellent resource capable of assisting at work of the Italian Private Investigators and of making their services much more economically affordable.
When the old-school stalking or visual surveillance is not integrated in the modern investigation resources, it has been recently losing its value in many circumstances, because more and more often people lead a double life: the real one (in the reduction phase) and the virtual one (in the expansion phase).
Observing and interpreting the behavior of your object is still one of the most useful activities (after the listening) from the investigation point of view. Nevertheless, these days it is no more enough to physically tail the individual, but they must be also followed while using social media and the internet in general.
Even for the Criminal Police who can intercept all the communication of their suspects (if authorized to do so by the prosecutor), the listening is often overtaken by the data transmission, because people chat and send messages or videos much more often than they speak.
To mention just a few examples: in the past the Italian Private Investigator working for the Italian Investigation Agency was tailing the faithless object till his lover. Now many people cheat online without leaving their house or include their meetings in the electronic calendars which more and more often are far from prying eyes and out of the reach of the telephoto lens of the Italian Security.
Furthermore, in the cases of the corporate infidelity or absenteeism or the Law no. 104 (which, among others, determines the principles of assisting the persons with disabilities) abuses, the suspects may work remotely from their homes, making their faults undetectable at first check. Not to mention all the delinquent behaviors of a neglectable criminal offence.
The skill of the owner of the Italian Private Detective Agency lies in alternating the direct measures (steak-outs and surveillance, still very useful) with the virtual interventions (web, social, chat) and with undercover meetings in order to obtain the maximal investigation result permitted by law and efficient from the client’s perspective.
Many of my colleagues, owners of the Italian Investigation Agency, consider the information found online as a formidable help to their investigations, while others claim that this virtualization penalizes our work, because the virtual activities are protected by privacy much more strictly than the real ones. I believe that you cannot have neither pessimistic nor optimistic attitude in advance, everything depends on the case. It is just like in case of stalking: there are objects easy to follow, who commit indiscretions easy to be taken by the telephoto lens, and there are ones that are difficult to keep an eye on. Just like there are true maniacs of privacy, albeit ubiquitous in social media and in the internet, and there are people who stalk themselves by posting their photos and videos online, in order to keep the Italian Bodyguard, commissioned to watch over them, up-to-date.